A new targeting tool is set for release from ValueClick. The tool is a predictive behavioral targeting tool which provides marketers with anonymous consumer behavior and then predicts future behaviors based on the past information. The Precision BT suite combines Precision Retargeting and Precision Profiles, giving marketers unique insight into consumer behavior.

“What makes Precision Profiles unique is our access to a critical mass of anonymous consumer online experiences and the way our technology dynamically categorizes and transforms them into hundreds of interest segments,” said Matthew Boyd, senior vice president, ValueClick Media. “Combined with the ability for our optimization technology to identify the best possible context in which to serve an ad, we have assembled the most scalable, data-driven audience targeting platform for marketers to achieve their brand and direct response objectives.”

By using predictive algorithms, marketers are given insight into the segments and times that consumers’ visit certain websites, publishers or content sites. This is very valuable information because by knowing when and where consumers will “stop by” they can determine where and how they will advertise, thereby increasing campaign ROI.

The anonymous information provided to marketers includes web browsing, interaction with ads and search and shopping behaviors.

Until the last couple of months, online ad spending seemed to be the only advertising spending that was remaining at a steady pace. This is true no longer. According to a new report by PubMatic, online advertising spending is beginning to decline just like advertising spending has been declining offline.

The report finds that May and June showed the average price for online ads drop by about a penny per ad, which isn’t nearly the slowdown that offline ads have shown. Still, it is interesting to note that online spending is not immune to the economic downtrend in the US.

PubMatic follows the advertising spending done by more than 4,000 online publishers. While they do not identify which properties are pricing at which price point, the overall numbers don’t lie. The company has only been following online advertising pricing since April, so there is no year-over-year data for comparison. It is possible, although unlikely, that this is a seasonal trend that has been going on for years.

“Online advertising is in a holding pattern like many sectors of the US economy,” said Rajeev Goel (via MediaPost). “What we’re seeing is that the economy is in a wait-and-see mode.” Goel went on to say that even though the pending recession in the US will likely be short-term, advertisers and publishers are waiting to see exactly what will happen.

advertising search engine marketing seo facebook pay per click Turbo Tagger

From the developer’s blog: “I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.”

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.

Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.

Bulk management of plugins.

A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.

Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.

Plugin update notification bubble.

Customizable default avatars.

You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.

Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.

Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.

You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.

Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.

Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”

You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.

Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

In-game advertising is a fast growing advertising category thanks to the openness of gamers to receive ads while playing games. Studies have shown that gamers feels ads shown during games are preferable to paying for game play; gamers have also indicated that ads in games makes the games feel more realistic. Yahoo Games is currently the most visited online gaming site, ahead of EA Online and Disney Games.

The partnerships will allow online gamers to download the full versions of games from publishers like Big Fish Games, Gogii Games and PopCap. The games will be ad supported.

Ads can be pre, mid and post-roll or CPM based.

DoubleFusion and NeoEdge will serve and track the advertisements; the ads can be purchased directly from Yahoo Games, Double Fusion or NeoEdge.

“This way [advertisers] are free to work with more than one ad serving technology,” said Kyle Laughlin. “If they also want search or display across properties in Yahoo. . .we can facilitate that, too.”

The first rule of online marketing is that the more personal you can make a pitch the better. Turns out the opposite may be true: A recently published study found that the more personalized a message, the less likely a recipient is to respond.

Researchers from the University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University studied the way people responded to emails from a fictional film-review Web site. The volunteers wrote a review for the site and filled out an online profile. Only people who gave the site permission to contact them with future promotions were included in the study.

The researchers found that while some degree of personalization, like addressing someone by name, made people more likely to respond to emails from the site, there’s a fine line between helpful and creepy. A message that addressed someone by name and said “as an action-movie fan, we thought you’d be interested in joining others in San Francisco” was the email equivalent of a pushy sales person, Debra Zahay, one of the study’s authors, tells the Business Technology Blog.

The study found that over time a business could start to personalize emails, but not until it had a longstanding relationship with a customer. Otherwise it’s like talking about marriage on the first date – while it shows you’re serious, it’s also a little freaky.

And that is really the bottom line, Tiffany Barnett White, another of the authors, tells the Business Technology Blog. “As academics we like to have really technical terms,” she says. “But really it’s just the creep-out factor.”

It has long been assumed by many investors that acquiring Valueclick (VCLK) would be the first step in “plan B” for Microsoft (MSFT) if its bid to take over Yahoo (YHOO) was unsuccessful. When MSFT’s Steve Ballmer recently ruled out a slew of acquisitions of smaller internet players after pulling its bid for Yahoo, ValueClick’s stock seemed to lose some of its “takeover bait” premium over the next couple of trading sessions. Since that time, the sell off in ValueClick shares has intensified and the stock has set new 52 week lows three times over the last week as rumors swirl that it is now hunting for some strategic acquisitions of its own. As might be expected, investors appear to be pricing in 1) concerns over dilution that might accompany any acquisition 2) typical “sell the buyer, buy the seller” arbitrage or 3) that an acquisition is signaling the switch of management efforts to acquiring instead of being acquired.

Much of the chatter regarding ValueClick acquisitions has focused on the possibility of their acquiring a company that would gain them entrance to the “Pay Per Click” [PPC] advertising space, the very high margin business that the Google empire was built upon where advertisers bid for placement in search results that are offered when consumers seek information on specific keyword search terms. This business was invented by Goto.com, which became Overture.com and was acquired by Yahoo and is now Yahoo Search Marketing. This space has been dominated by Yahoo and Google (GOOG), with Microsoft making a late run to gain a foothold in this space and round out “the big three” in the PPC space. While there has always been a “second tier” of companies trying to gain traction in the pay per click space, none have been able to come close to challenging “the big three” for various reasons.

While we are not in a position to know if there is any substance to the rumors, it does seem that the recent upheaval at Yahoo might make a historic opportunity for the right company to make waves in the pay per click space. If a Yahoo/MSFT deal were to reemerge or if Yahoo moves forward with its plans to outsource much of its premium PPC business to Google, the combination of the #2 and #3 players or the #1 and #2 players in this space would leave the door open for another company to slip into the #3 position. While we don’t think there is any magic associated with being the #3 player in PPC search, we do think that there are quite a few deep pocketed advertisers out there who view both Microsoft and Google as their most feared competitors and would like to see their advertising dollars flow to someone else, particularly newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, TV, radio and other legacy media companies.

Another factor that could make for a historic opportunity to enter the PPC search fray is the current market valuations of the second tier players. Just over a year ago, all companies in the online advertising space (but particularly the owners of ad networks) were being bid up to new trading highs after the frenzied buying of many of the other players ((ie.Aquantive, Doubliclick, 24/7 Media, Linkshare, Digitas) in this space for large premiums to their trading prices. As the deal volume dried up, much of the money flowed out of these names and many are now trading at historic lows.

The two names we have seen tossed around most often as a ValueClick acquisition targets fit neatly into this category - Miva (MIVA) and Think Partnership (THK).

Miva Media Solutions, previously known as Findwhat.com, is the largest of the second tier networks. With over $100 million in annual click revenue flowing through the company’s North American and European networks, Miva stands out as the quickest option for an acquiror looking to gain heft quickly. Miva also owns a number of valuable content sites including the rapidly growing Spill.com, Screensavers.com and WeatherStudio.com in addition to a growing toolbar segment that currently boasts of over 6 million active users.

In addition to offering the possibility of instantly becoming the next largest player in PPC behind MSFT, adding highly regarded content sites and leveraging the possibilities inherent in having an installed base of over 6 million toolbars, ValueClick and others have to look at the current market valuation of MIVA as extremely attractive. With a current market cap of $32.5 million (closing price July 1), no debt and over $22 million in the bank, the same marketplace that one year ago placed a valuation on these operations of just over $225 million is currently placing a value on this same business of less than $10 million. While the $250 million+ valuation achieved during the height of the ad network buying frenzy of a year ago might be on the high side, its hard to imagine that there are not buyers out there willing to pay three or four times the current trading price to take down such a large piece of pay per click market share. ValueClick in particular does seem like a company with the complementary assets, existing clientele and market cache’ necessary to take a business like Miva’s that is struggling to be profitable and significantly expand the margins by reaching the critical mass of advertisers necessary to ramp profitability quickly. With an existing CPA (Cost Per Action) network and display advertising business that reaches 74% of US internet users, its quite likely that ValueClick’s reach and brand name would bring many more advertisers into the fold quickly and also that existing advertisers would be more likely to bid higher and spend more through a ValueClick ad network than they would through Miva owned network.

The company whose name seems to be most frequently mentioned as a takeover candidate for ValueClick is called Think Partnership, (THK). Think Partnership (hereinafter THK) is in many respects similar to ValueClick, albeit a smaller version as it is most widely known for the affiliate marketing platform (Kowabunga) within its “network” segment and the lead generation operations within its “Direct” segment.

THK’s Kowabunga is a highly regarded player in the affiliate marketing space that has long been a thorn in the side of ValueClick, whose “Commission Junction” is the largest player in the affiliate marketing space. While Kowabunga is much smaller than Commission Junction, many high profile corporate names have either chosen Kowabunga over ValueClick’s Commission Junction when they started their affiliate program (like Microsoft and Yahoo Search Marketing’s affiliate programs ) or migrated to Kowabunga after testing the Commission Junction platform (like Intuit). Taking ownership of Kowabunga would make ValueClick’s Commission Junction not only the largest affiliate program provider, but also the “go to” provider for the largest names in technology, not to mention that the removal of a competitor like Kowabunga from the playing field might allow them to raise their percentage take on affiliate transactions.

While the lead generation operations within THK’s “Direct” segment are much smaller than ValueClick’s lead generation ops from a revenue standpoint, THK has actually had more success at maintaining strong margins while steering clear of Federal Trade Commission sanctions. Additionally, the specific niche’s served by THK’s direct segment (home based business owners and life stage niche marketing) would be complementary to ValueClick’s lead generation offerings.

Despite the obvious synergies of the THK businesses above with ValueClick, it is a third aspect that makes it most attractive to ValueClick. THK’s ValidClick AdExchange offers ValueClick an entry into the Pay Per Click space with what is arguably the most differentiated offering in the PPC space and also what is likely the fastest growing ad exchange. The ValidClick AdExchange platform combines a unique patent pending technology for eliminating click fraud combined with an exclusive technology alliance with Fair Isaac Corporation (FIC) that uses analytics based on artificial intelligence and patented profiling technologies that adapt to each click and conversion, scoring publishers on their ability to drive conversions for advertisers. This new exclusive partnership with the company whose FICO score has become the standard in the lending industry makes the ValidClick Ad Exchange that much more attractive to a company wanting to differentiate themselves from the pack in the PPC space. It has also caused many of the second tier networks to run their own ads through ValidClick’s Ad Exchange to take advantage of its Click Fraud protection.

Recent comments by THK management and our own channel checks in several verticals suggest that the ValidClick exchange is experiencing exponential growth in clicks, searches and revenues generated. In the verticals we tested, we saw more than 100% growth in Q2 over the record clicks and revenue achieved by the network during Q1 2008. This Google-like growth stands in stark contrast to the declines in revenue experienced by most of the other Pay Per Click search networks (including Miva) over the last few quarters as Click Fraud concerns seem to have scared more and more advertisers away from second tier PPC networks. These concerns appear to be making the ValidClick’s click fraud prevention technology and alliance with Fair Isaac that much more appealing.

Despite the success of the ValidClick network, THK’s stock has recently traded down to a historical low, with a market cap settling in the $27 million range. With its existing business pieced together by acquisitions totaling nearly $90 million over the last three years, several business segments that appear to be flourishing and a company campaign to divest non core assets that could raise cash greater than its existing market cap, we believe that THK might look like a tremendous bargain to ValueClick and more importantly, a quick entry into the PPC space with a unique offering whose technology solves the biggest problem (Click Fraud) plaguing the second tier PPC networks.

We believe that ValueClick is uniquely positioned to make waves in the Pay Per Click space if it should make an attempt to enter the fray. We also believe that the timing is perfect for such an entry. The current Yahoo conundrum that will likely result in only two of the big three Per Per Click networks surviving combined with the capitulation among investors in the small cap online advertising names makes the “perfect storm” and possibly a historic opportunity for a well financed player with a good name to stake a claim to be the new “first tier” player in this highly profitable space. ValueClick’s sterling balance sheet (over $160 million with no debt) and scale would likely be attractive to MIVA and/or THK’s management team if they are in fact entertaining offers. We believe that they are and note that both have recently announced steps to divest of assets that would not be appealing to a ValueClick or other similarly situated suitor.

We also note that timing is of the essence as there may be some increase in the valuations accorded many of the online advertising assets when Interactive’s (IACI) spin off is complete next month and they begin shopping with their $1.5 billion cash war chest and a stock currency whose valuation will be based on the prospects of Ask.com rather than many of the slower growth businesses that plagued IACI’s valuation for so long. It will likely take just one deal by IACI, CBS’s (CBS) recently acquired CNET or one of the other media players who would benefit from owning an ad network to make the valuations move back to historical norms - much higher than where the currently reside.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Swedes may cherish openness and transparency, but not enough to accept a new law giving the government the right to snoop on all e-mails and phone calls crossing the country’s borders. Outrage over the statute has led to 2 million protests — filed by e-mail.

The online petition drive comes as other European Union countries consider granting authorities unprecedented spying powers over their own citizens amid fears of a mounting terror threat.

“This would have been totally unthinkable before Sept. 11,” said Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, calling for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts.

Under current law, e-mail and phone surveillance in Sweden require a court order in a suspected criminal case. Critics say the new law will encroach on privacy, jeopardize civil liberties and violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sweden’s Defense Minister Sten Tolgfors defended the law in an online forum on the Expressen Web site Tuesday, saying data regarding individuals will be destroyed unless it is directly relevant to intelligence activities.

He also stressed the need to defend Sweden from terror attacks like those in New York, Madrid and London.

“The information is needed to evaluate, and meet, outside threats against Sweden,” he said.

Even before the law was passed, TeliaSonera in April moved its e-mail servers to Finland because of the expected passage of the legislation.

Timo Lehtinen, of the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority, said he expected other telecommunications groups to rethink how they handle cross-border traffic, and expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Swedish measures.

“The amount of traffic is so vast that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “If someone was planning some kind of terrorist activity they could make it extremely hard, or even impossible, to trace.”

Other EU countries have enacted or are mulling stronger government snooping rules.

Britain has some of the most extensive surveillance powers in the world, allowing law enforcement, intelligence agencies and others to monitor telephone calls, e-mails or mail, with special permission from the Home Secretary.

The evidence is not admissible in court; Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to change that with new laws allowing use of some wiretap evidence.

In Germany, Parliament is expected to pass a new bill later this year giving officials the right to monitor some criminal suspects’ e-mails, but only with a court order, as is the case now for telephone wiretaps in serious crimes.

In Italy, which experts call one of the world’s most wiretapped democracies, the debate is going the other way — now focusing on how to do more to protect privacy.

A Swedish opinion poll published last week indicated that 47 percent of Swedes opposed the new law, while 36 percent are for it; the rest were undecided. The margin of error was not available.

The protest could further erode already declining support for Sweden’s center-right government, but is unlikely to cause a government crisis, since the coalition controls a solid parliamentary majority.

Niklas Wykman, chairman of the Conservative Party youth wing, told the Associated Press that he can’t support his party on the law.

“We are against the general eavesdropping of all Swedish citizens, which paves the way for a surveillance society,” he said.

That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com a Web site that opposes Senator Obama. They include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.

In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by activists supporting Senator Obama. According to the bloggers, the Obama supporters had clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs alerting Google that they were spam.

If so, that would be an embarrassment for Google. On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.”

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

“Without any notice, apology, or explanation, my posting privileges has been reinstated,” wrote the author of the blog Come a Long Way, who identifies herself as GeekLove. “Blogger’s ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach is appalling. As bloggers, it is a good thing we still have choices, and I have exercised my choice to leave Blogger and establish a new home at WordPress.”

Attempts to reach some of the anti-Obama bloggers were not immediately successful.

By the end of 2009, more than two-thirds of the US population—or 200 million people—will be going online.”Unfortunately, this potential audience for Internet ads is largely unenthusiastic about most forms of advertising, notably banners, rich media and the growing area of online video,” says David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issues. “A primary reason for their lukewarm attitude is Internet advertising’s irrelevance, with messages peripheral to their current interests and needs.”

However, with its promise of relevant advertising and greater revenues from ad inventory, behaviorally targeted advertising offers a ray of hope for online advertisers and Web publishers.

“And yet, collecting the visitor data needed for online ad targeting is raising concern among Internet privacy groups, the FTC, state governments—and, most importantly, consumers,” says Mr. Hallerman.

For the public, government agencies and the mainstream media, behavioral targeting can represent all the ways that companies appear to be violating individual privacy on the Internet.

As the FTC indicated in its report, “Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade,” while behavioral targeting “may result in more relevant advertisements being served to consumers, it also may implicate data security and privacy risks if the underlying information used to target consumers is not adequately secured or is misused by companies in the marketing chain.”

The report went on to say, “Given the amount of information—personal and otherwise—about consumers that is likely to be collected, used and stored, privacy will continue to be a top consumer protection priority for the FTC.”

“While Internet companies argue that behavioral targeting benefits Internet users because it greatly increases the relevance of the advertising they see online, perception is reality,” says Mr. Hallerman.

Consumers are confused.

The second annual “State of the Media Democracy” study from Deloitte and the Harrison Group found that while 66% of US Internet users said they would click on additional Internet ads if they were better targeted and 67% would be willing to accept more ads in exchange for free and valuable content, a similar number—65%—called Internet advertising more intrusive than print ads.

Making a strong argument for behavioral targeting, a TNS Global survey commissioned by TRUSTe found that 72.4% of Internet users “agree” or “strongly agree” that irrelevant Internet advertising was intrusive and annoying.

“As people make the Internet an increasing part of their daily lives, privacy issues will become more of a battleground,” says Mr. Hallerman.

However, among marketers and Web publishers attuned to consumer concerns, a good portion of these issues can likely be resolved through a clear process of informed consent.

“In other words,” says Mr. Hallerman, “ask the audience for permission.”

Just like marketers have learned to do with e-mail.

Explore all the pros and cons of this controversial new advertising tactic, download the eMarketer report, Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issues, today Source: emarketer.com

RSS and Atom are formats for publishing syndication “feeds,” which are simple lists of news headlines, blog postings or other online content. Today, large and growing audiences of web users are using RSS and Atom-enabled newsreaders to quickly scan and read dozens of their favorite sites at a glance. The syndication craze has caught on big time, as evidenced by the fact that almost everybody - from The New York Times to the blogger next door - has started publishing a syndication feed.

Everybody likes it when webpages download quickly. That’s why size optimization matters so much for commercial websites — smaller sites (in terms of kilobyte-size) make for faster downloads, and happier users.

Speed is rarely an issue with RSS and Atom feeds. They’re mostly free from fancy HTML layout and modem-clogging graphics, and usually download so quickly that users can’t tell which feeds are fatter than others. In fact, serious RSS surfers usually prefer the feeds that carry a few extra kilobytes of text, in the form of unabridged articles or lengthy abstracts. Scanning a skimpy set of headlines in a news aggregator isn’t as satisfying as getting the full story.

GZip shrinks the source code of your file before sending it out over the wires. So, while newsreaders will still be banging on your site, they’ll be pulling smaller files. Most full-featured newsreaders accept GZipped files and understand how to decompress them.

If your web server isn’t serving pages with HTTP 1.1 and compression turned on, check with your sysadmin. It’s possible they’re compressing files with the .html extension, but forgot to add the .rss, .xml or .rdf extensions. It’s also possible that they’re just really behind the times, and still running an older HTTP 1.0 server.

If you use a blogging tool such as Blogger, TypePad or MovableType, you’ll notice the option to “ping” certain sites whenever you add new information to your blog. Pinging informs certain RSS-savvy portal sites and search engines (like Technorati) that your feed has been updated and ready to be added to their database. The advantages for you, of course, are increased visibility and traffic. Traditional search engines, like Google, only glance at your site on a regular, fixed schedule. It can take up to a week for your site changes to register in their search index. In contrast, these RSS-savvy spiders will attempt to visit your site’s feed whenever it is altered, thereby providing something closer to real-time search.

There’s also an excellent site called Ping-O-Matic that will ping over a dozen services on your behalf, and at no cost. The single burden for you is that you are required to manually enter your URL on their home page.

That just about wraps up our advice for juicing up your syndication feeds. However, there is one more very important piece of advice that I feel compelled to pass along. The techniques we discussed in this article should help you nip and tuck your syndication files into very pretty RSS or Atom feeds, but only from a technical standpoint. Don’t forget that in a text-centric medium like syndication, content is still king. File compression and favicons are no substitute for stories, opinions or ideas that deserve an audience.

Nothing trumps good writing! If you take the time to craft a great entry plus a thoughtful title and a clear description, that will impress users more than any 88×31 logo can.